The present invention relates to wireless communication system in general, and more particularly, to a method and system for noise and interference reduction in a wireless communication system.
A wireless communication system involves a cellular structure where a call control and management device such as a base station communicates with a number of mobile terminals using a predetermined frequency band. For every terminal, signals other than those that are destined for it are considered to be noises or interferences fro other sources. The sources for the interferences can vary in a great deal. For example, each terminal may represent a potential source of interference for other mobile terminal in the same coverage area. Given the market acceptance of wireless communication devices, the number of wireless communications devices will probably only increase over the next several years. As such, the interference is likely to increase over time.
To limit the effects of the interference caused by the proliferation of wireless devices, an adaptive antenna array, also referred to as a smart antenna, having interference reduction or nulling capabilities may be used. The antenna array typically contains one or more antenna elements. During both the uplink and downlink communications, the receivers of base stations or terminals receive the combination of the signals of interest and interfering communication signals transmitted from other sources including persistent noises such as the thermal noise. With proper preprocessing such as channelization and CDMA despreading, it may be possible to enhance the signal of interest and suppress any interference and noise components. However, when the power levels of interference components are significantly higher than those of the signals of interest, a sufficiently high signal to interference and noise ratio is hard to obtain to assure a correct detection of the signals of interest or the underlying digital symbols. To alleviate the signal detection difficulty, numerous blind algorithms have been developed based on the unique signal properties such as finite-set, cyclostationarity, and constant modulus properties. Unfortunately, these algorithms may not be so effective due to the fact that many interfering signals are generated by other base stations or their corresponding terminals which use a same frequency band as or an overlapping frequency band with the one carrying the signals of interest, thereby inevitably possessing the same signal properties. Moreover, these algorithms are usually computationally intensive and require a significant number of data samples to have satisfactory performance.
What is needed is an improved method for reducing or nulling interferences for a wireless communication system.